Open Source Foundations Coming of Age — What Next?

An article at The H makes the case that many open source foundations have successfully proven their worth and withstood the test of time as legitimate entities. This leads to the question: where do they go from here? The author suggests an umbrella foundation to provide consistent direction across many projects. Quoting; "As you might expect, the main aim of most foundations is to promote their own particular project and its associated programs. For the putative [Open Source Foundation Foundation], that would generalise into promoting open source foundations as a way of supporting open source activity. In practical terms, that might translate into establishing best practice, codifying what needs to be done in order to create an open source foundation in different jurisdictions with their differing legal requirements. That would make it far easier for smaller projects – such as Krita – to draw on that body of knowledge once they have decided to take this route. It might also encourage yet more projects to do the same, encouraged by the existence of support mechanisms that will help them to navigate safely the legal requirements, and to minimise costs by drawing on the experience of others. After all, this is precisely the way open source works, and what makes it so efficient: it tries to avoid re-inventing the wheel by sharing pre-existing solutions to problems or sub-problems."

Comments

"Centralization does not scale."

[John Hasler]

Multiple "umbrella" organizations? Sure. One single central authority? Do Not Want.

Re:"Centralization does not scale."

[jcoy42]

No kidding. I read that summary as "Hey, we've found these systems that are really working well and so we were thinking we'd like to change that".

It's working JUST FINE- bugger off.

Re:"Centralization does not scale."

[davester666]

It's just like most analysts of Apple.

You are very successful up to now.
But now that you are so successful, you must change and start doing things the way everybody else is, otherwise, you will go out of business.

Exchanging the Bazar for the Cathedral?

[Lisias]

*NO*.

Open source can be a "mess". But it's exactly this "mess" that makes the FOSS resilient.

Re:SImple really...

[unixisc]

This is pure hogwash. First of all, Ubuntu, or Mint, or the dozens of distros are not recognized by GNU as legit; instead, what is endorsed are distros like Trisquel, Dyne:bolic, gNewSense and some others that nobody outside the FSF has heard of. Secondly, while it's true that Linux distros have been made that boot automatically and so on, very often, this plug & play functionality is b'cos they have binary blobs - something that's hated by the FSF guys. OSI doesn't have an issue w/ them, but FSF does. That's why one is more likely to find holes in those Linux-libre distros than in the standard Linux distros. Heck, even Debian, recognizing that there are times that un-liberated software is needed, provides those separately from its liberated software for those who are not that uptight about this purity, and guess what? Debian too doesn't have the endorsement of the FSF.

Open source is more accommodating of such deviations than Free Software, and that is why most businesses are more receptive to it.

Re:Make Open Source win-win

[YurB]

This shows me that RMS was right: open source is too lose term. 100 businesses making similar modifications to the source code of a single program on their own, fixing the same bugs, adding the same features is a waste of time. Also they may begin suing each other eventually. Libre Software is all about cooperation, and source availability is just a technical requirement for that.